The enduring trauma of partition
75 years ago, Britain’s control over 400 million people on the Indian subcontinent ceased. It was the beginning of the end of the British empire. On 14 August 1947, people in Pakistan proudly marked the creation of the new dominion with a ceremony in Karachi, attended by the governor-general Muhammed Ali Jinnah. A day later, led by India’s new prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Indians celebrated the British departure. British India had been carved up into two countries, Pakistan and India, largely along religious lines. The former included East Pakistan, separated from West Pakistan by almost 1,000 miles.
The movement for independence had begun many decades earlier. The British had formally arrived in India in the 1600s, establishing trading posts under the British East India Company, and India came under direct British rule in 1858. The nationalist movement began in the late 19th century and gained huge momentum following the Second World War – a conflict in which 2.5 million soldiers from what is today India, Pakistan and Bangladesh served.
As religious identity became stronger – stoked, many commentators have argued, by British policies of divide and rule – two competing visions of independence emerged, which grew increasingly politicised along religious lines. The Congress Party, led by Nehru, wanted India to remain united in a secular state once the British left. But by 1940, Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, felt that India’s almost 100 million Muslims – a quarter of the population – would be marginalised by the Hindu majority. He wanted safeguards to be put in place, and even a separate homeland.
The endgame of empire was conducted against a backdrop of rising communal violence across northern India, as people from the “other” religion were targeted. Before, there had
